Brazil's Supreme Court authorizes investigation of Bolsonaro for fraud during COVID-19 pandemic

Published at: 18/09/2025 09:08 PM

A judge of the Supreme Court of Brazil, determined this Thursday, September 18, that alleged irregularities incurred by the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), already convicted of a coup, should be investigated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which left more than 700,000 deaths in the country.

The decision, reported the DW portal, was taken by Judge Flávio Dino, who has called for the reopening of several aspects of a case that had been filed by the Attorney General's Office in mid-2022, when Bolsonaro was still in power.

At the time, the then Attorney General Augusto Aras, a man faithful to Bolsonarism, rejected the content of a report prepared by a special Senate committee, which investigated the Government's management of the pandemic and detected numerous irregularities.

The parliamentary report, in fact, accused Bolsonaro of nine crimes: crimes against humanity, health infraction, medical quackery, incitement to crime, falsification of documents, irregular use of public money, prevarication, an epidemic resulting in death and attacks on the dignity of the office.

In the document ordering the reopening of the case, he argued that “the parliamentary investigation pointed to signs of crimes against the public administration, especially with contracts, fraud with tenders, overpricing, diversion of public resources, signing contracts with shell companies”, among many others.

Some of these situations refer to the purchase of medicines supposedly effective against COVID, but which later proved ineffective and were still purchased by the Government and distributed in the public health network, such as chloroquine.

Judge Dino's decision, which gave the Federal Police a 60-day deadline to investigate the matter, was announced a week after the First Chamber of the Supreme Court, of which the magistrate is a member, sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years and three months in prison for a coup conspiracy hatched after Luiz Inácio da Silva defeated him at the polls in the October 2022 elections.